Tara Turkington
Northern Cape MEC for Safety and Security and Public Works Eunice Komane has scorned the high life, choosing to live in the servants’ quarters of a house in one of Kimberley’s downmarket suburbs, rather than in a palatial home she could easily afford.
When asked about her home, Komane, who generally avoids publicity, said, with a disarming shrug of her shoulders, “It’s who I am. As far as I’m concerned, status is who you are, how you behave.
“To me, it’s very important to stay in touch with the people, to continue to be who you are … Youth must understand the values that are really important in life, it is not money, fancy houses and fancy cars.
“The fact that I live in a wonderful house and drive a wonderful car doesn’t necessarily make me a wonderful person.” She does, reluctantly, drive a Mercedes Benz though.
Komane, a divorced mother of three and a grandmother, is the sister of Free State Premier Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri. Her life philosophy is summed up in a Sesotho saying that was one of her mother’s favourites: “Boikokobetso bo tswala borena [Humility bears kings].” She quotes another Sesotho proverb, with a twinkle in her eye: “Motho ke motho ka batho ba bang [A person is a person through other people].”
She has also done away with the 24-hour security that is normally mandatory for Northern Cape MECs. “I’m working for the people. The kind of protection they get is what I get. If someone really wants to kill me, well, so be it.”
Komane, a past provincial chair of the African National Congress Women’s League, was initially selected to head the safety and security portfolio, but then quietly took on the extra mantle of public works after the previous MEC, the National Party’s Peggy Hollander, gave up her post when the NP left the government of national unity.
“I’ve really been pushing the issue of women standing up for their rights,” Komane says of her term of office.
Her divorce was a result of abuse, she says, explaining that she had the option of taking her children out of the difficult circumstances in which they lived, which effectively meant losing their father, or living to bear mental scars.
“If I can get out of that [sort of relationship], anyone can. My father recognised the equal role that my mother had to play in the home. Women are in no way inferior to men. Women must know, `You are worth something.'”
Komane, who was born in the Free State in 1941, pursued a nursing career before venturing into full-time politics in the 1990s. As a nurse, she was always aware of wanting to stay in touch with ordinary people. After majoring in community health and nursing education in her BA nursing science which she completed in 1989, she became a tutor at a Kimberley nursing college, but “that was too elitist for me, it took me out of touch with the ordinary people”.
So, she simply resigned to become an ordinary nurse again, working, for example, with “old women who said they didn’t care if they hadn’t washed for a week”. Her task was to inspire them to enjoy their lives again.
Reflecting on the province’s high crime levels, Komane lashes out at materialism, saying: “We have all joined the bandwagon by putting such value on monetary things, which helps to create crime because values become skewed.
“It’s really a mad world. Society must take responsibility for people who are murderers. I think it’s time that all of us stand up and take responsibility [for conflict]. We should ask, `What is there that we can do?'”
Before moving to Kimberley three years ago, Komane lived in one of Kimberley’s poorest townships, Retswelele. She says her present accommodation is really a stepping stone, as after the election she will be leaving the public eye and the province for a quiet retirement on a small plot she has bought.
“Politics is a dirty game,” she says with a knowing chuckle.